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The Western Digital Raptor Hard Drive and How Much Speed It Can Bring You |
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Saturday, 17 February 2007 |
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I've been telling people for years now that the Western Digital Raptor hard drive is one of the most important components for a fast computer. It's relatively cheap compared to other fast storage solutions like RAID, and it loosens up one of the most common bottlenecks in a computer - The Hard Drive.
If you've spent more than $800 on a new computer but didn't include a 10,000rpm (revolutions per minute) hard drive, then you should feel guilty.
It's a very simple concept, really. CPU's, motherboards, and memory have all gotten faster overall the years allowing today's computers to be more capable and potentially more powerful than ever.
The problem is that hard drives have more or less
stayed at the same speed over the years.
How can we expect the overall performance of a computer
to go up if the hard drive cannot increase its deliver of the data?
Mainstream hard drives however have stayed the same at the same speed just about forever, which is 7,200rpm. In fact, I think hard drives have gotten slower ever the years because they now come in a bigger size yet still spin at the same speed. Sure, the buffer size has gone up but what we really need a hard drive that truly delivers the data at a faster speed so that the rest of our computer system isn't idle waiting for chunks of data to arrive.
Enter the Western Digital Raptor drive. Years ago when this model was first released, it was expensive but not as expensive as RAID configurations but delivered similar performance at only a fraction of the price. Today Western Digital offers 10,000rpm Raptor drives up to 150gb. They even came out with a recent model called the Raptor X that had a clear covering so that you could see the hard drive platters spinning inside and a red LED light, too. Pretty cool.
I bought into the hype 3 years ago when the Raptor drives first came out and I'm happy I did. They DO make a huge difference in performance in everything that you do. Windows boot times, file-managing, gaming, and especially data-intensive multimedia applications like video-editing. I remember the read/write speeds to be about twice as fast as regular 7,200rpm hard drives. The burst performance is great meaning you get a very responsive computer when you click here and there.
The final word: GO AND BUY a WESTERN DIGITAL RAPTOR HARD DRIVE. Really, I mean it. Please buy this hard drive if you want faster overall performance. Seriously, they make that big of a difference. If you're buying a new computer, you are crippling your system's performance by going with some regular 300gb S-ATA drive.
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